Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Finally the IL-2 Cliffs of Dover Patch is released

and for me anyway, it aint great...I seem to get a lot better performance before to be honest.

Anyway, here is the latest news direct from the publisher on the much awaited BETA patch, good luck if it works for you, and fingers crossed.

Gooddayeveryone!

The patch is ready! What we have today is a DX10-only alpha. DX9 support is specifically removed. If you are running DX9, do not apply the patch!

The main purpose of the alpha is to find and squash any remaining or new bugs, especially crash bugs. The most common of the infamous launcher crashes have been fixed, but a few very hard to catch bugs remain. On average, a full day of flying causes about 0.8 crashes, and our internal testing has not yet provided the crash logs needed to zero in on the issue.

Please enable logging in your conf.ini (Log=1). If the game crashes, send us your log as well as any crash dump files created in the cppdump folder in the main game installation. Email everything toishevchenko@1cpublishing.eu

So! Get testing. Get reporting. Make sure your logging is enabled, and send us your crashlogs!

We don’t have a complete readme at this time, but a rough list of changes is below.

Known Issues

•Not fully optimized: grass, clouds, and trees. Clouds cause constant FPS drop; grass and trees cause hick-ups. A few extra days of work for this, a few days for grass, few days for clouds, we felt that we could start open testing the patch without waiting for these changes.•Texture cache failing to draw higher-res textures on close-up objects with lower settings on below-recommended video cards.•Weathering textures on aircraft appear shiny in shadows.•No damage decals on aircraft from small-caliber hits.•The hit flash effects are temporarily turned off.•Far and medium distance clouds are temporarily turned off.•Text in dialogue windows in the mission builder may appear bugged with other dialogue windows underneath.•The front line in mission builder and minimap is drawn incorrectly.

Changes and Improvements

Performance

We've performed a huge amount of work improving both average and minimum FPS in the game. Most recommended-spec machine will see a roughly double average FPS and a significant reduction in the micro-freezes that had previously plagued the game. Their frequency, duration, and overall FPS impact will be greatly reduced or completely redone.

Some of the changes include:

• Completely rewritten render pipeline, which reduced CPU load;• Rewritten texture manager, reducing stutter when loading new textures;• Moved landscape geometry generator to its own CPU core, reducing stutters;• Optimized tree code, reducing stutters when moving across landscape or rotating camera;• Moved grass generator to its own CPU core, decreasing stutters during low-level flight;• Moved all building and vehicle damage models to be pre-loaded, rather than dynamically loaded when they are destroyed. This increased mission loading times and memory usage, and reduced stutters when blowing things up;• Improved multithreading in many other aspects of the code, improving minimal FPS on most multicore machines.

Flight Model

We've performed a tremendous amount of work testing and improving flight models in the game, as well as improving various aircraft engines. We used actual pilot's notes and flight testing data during the process (thank you Sean!). Unfortunately some deeply-set limitations in the engine code do not allow us to minimize the margin of error at altitudes about 7 km (21,000 ft) where most aircraft begin to perform worse than their real-life counterparts. Fixing this requires more extensive code rework and will therefore only appear with the upcoming sequel. However at lower altitudes most flyables will perform much closer to real life. We also have to note that some aircraft, most notably Spitfire Mk.II, had better performance than the real thing. Others, especially their engines, had reduced performance. We've addressed these serious issues and made our planes fly much closer to the real thing.

Partial List:

G.50Temperature models of the engine were wrong due to incorrect data. The engine could not get up to required power at all altitudes. We've also added +100 boost for WEP mode.

Spitfire Mk.IIThe aircraft's speed performance was too good at all altitudes, sometimes 60 mph better than the real thing.

Spitfire Mk.IFixed the top speed dip above 18,000 ft.

Hurricane Mk.ISpeed performance was also too good at all altitudes, similar to the Spit II.

Blenheim Mk.IVHad many problems with the engine model. The engine overheated at normal RPM, the plane could not get up to stated airspeed at all altitudes. Maximum allowed airspeed was too great, and the plane could get up to 560 mph in a dive. A huge amount of work was performed to improve the plane's FM and bring it up to speed.

Artificial Intelligence

Partial list:

• Fixed some non-working orders, removed others from the list. There are no more orders available to the player that the AI does not follow.• Added a request for available targets;• Turned off friendly fire for ground battles (improving FPS);• Added the ability to query current waypoint for scripts;• Told AI pilots not to commit ritual suicide when their leader crash-lands;• Fixed out of turn take offs for AI pilots;